Here’s a hill (or, perhaps, a moor) I’m willing to die on: Wuthering Heights is not that hard to read. And yet, the number of people openly struggling to get through the novel is concerning.
Recently, my FYP is filled with videos of grown women who, after seeing the sexed up trailer for Emerald Fennel’s version which stars Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi, ran to Amazon for a copy of the 1847 Emily Brontë classic and seem confused. Perhaps they were expecting a BookTok-worthy rom-com only to find that it’s actually a novel about class, inequality, racism, abuse and generational trauma. In some of these videos, people are also sharing guides to reading the book. Tips like “highlight it within an inch of its life” or “go to Sparknotes after each chapter” have me concerned. And I’m not the only one.
Let’s be real. Wuthering Heights is, compared to many classic novels, not all that difficult. Sure, a few characters have the same first names, but keeping track of the various Earnshaws and Lintons is a walk in the park compared to the Russian canon.
It’s also a relatively simple narrative, largely plot-driven and mostly linear, once you come to grips with the framing device, which is a story-within-a-story format. This is not a novel that experiments much with form. It is not, for instance, a work of poetic stream of consciousness. Try reading The Waves and get back to me.
In fact, Wuthering Heights is considered to be one of the easiest classics to read, so much so that it is (or was) often assigned to 16-year-old students.
Before I’m accused of sounding elitist or privileged, I’d like to clarify that my stance this isn’t about being college educated or being brought up in a house filled with books, or being encouraged to read as a child. It’s more that we live in a society that doesn’t prize skills like critical thinking or long-form reading anymore. I don’t blame any of the individuals posting about not being able to get through Wuthering Heights; I mainly blame the world we’re living in. A world that, during the course of the last decade or so, has slowly been moving away from valuing critical thinking and the ability to read anything longer than a social media caption.